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Toronto duo Whitehorse finds its voice ‘Downtown’

Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland were adamant from the get-go that Whitehorse was a proper band and not a couple’s holiday away from their “real” careers, but even they now admit they didn’t completely believe it at first.

“When we started Whitehorse, it was really important to us to get the message out that this is not a side project,” says McClelland, recovering from an exceedingly chilly photo shoot on the Six Shooter Records rooftop with the aid of beer. “But I don’t think we’d really convinced ourselves at that point.”

Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland of Whitehorse perform a stripped-down version of a song from their new album Leave No Bridge Unburned on Six Shooter Records.

“Melissa was still hiding all her good songs,” offers Doucet.

“Well, I’d write a song and go, ‘This one’s not for Whitehorse,’” admits McClelland, laughing guiltily. “Luke would be, like, ‘You can’t do that!’ Now it just seems ridiculous to me.”

It now seems faintly ridiculous, too, that Doucet and McClelland waited through five years of marriage before taking the plunge and making their on-again/off-again musical partnership onstage and in the studio official with Whitehorse in 2011.

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Their romance was born when Doucet produced McClelland’s Stranded in Suburbia album in 2004 and they’ve been performing together as much as their schedules would permit ever since, so it made perfect sense to take the next step and make it a band. Both have since been pleasantly surprised, however, to find that band — “Something that was born of us just wanting to spend time together,” as Doucet puts it — taking them to creative and commercial plateaus they had never experienced on their own.

Their 2012 sophomore album, The Fate of the World Depends on this Kiss, notched them a spot on the Polaris Music Prize shortlist the following year. A sold-out, career-making gig at Massey Hall swiftly followed.

Now, Whitehorse has a genuine radio hit in “Downtown,” the lead single from its third record, Leave No Bridge Unburned, which has managed to crack previously elusive commercial-radio outlets like 102.1 the Edge and climb all the way to No. 2 on the Canadian “alternative” chart.

Neither Doucet nor McClelland is too cool to admit that hearing the song on the radio everywhere they go is a major thrill. As it should be.

“Radio’s never really been our realm,” says Doucet. “We’ve just been such hippies about the way we make our music that we’ve never qualified. The music that gets on the radio is usually pretty tight and to-the-point. You know the Tom Petty adage: ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.’ That’s how you make songs for the radio. And we’ve never had success with that, we’ve never understood the formula. . .

“It’s so funny. When you don’t have success at something like that, it’s easy to disparage and say ‘I hate radio’ and ‘I hate everything mainstream’ and ‘I’m cooler than that.’ But all of a sudden you feel yourself feeling a little more benevolent towards the world when the world accepts your art.”

The beefed-up, rather more cocksure sound of Leave No Bridge Unburned is definitely facilitating Whitehorse’s stealthy incursion into the mainstream.

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After two albums and two EPs, McClelland and Doucet welcomed outside producers into the fold for the first time, hooking up with Montreal studio hounds Gus Van Go and Werner F after Doucet developed a bit of an obsession with how fat Van Go got the rhythm section to sound on the Stills’ Oceans Will Rise.

“That was something I didn’t know how to do,” Doucet says. Thus, upon meeting Van Go, Whitehorse took the opportunity to learn.

They got off to a bit of a harsh start, mind you, when their new producer rejected the 15 tunes they’d prepared for the new record, cancelled the sessions and sent them home to write “real songs.”

But it all worked out in the end. Van Go was merely encouraging Whitehorse to keep on doing the sultry, bluesy, slightly dark-shaded “Gothic Canadiana” thing it’s been doing all along, to stop over-thinking everything and “trying to be too brainy or wordy.”

“It was really great to hear someone verbalize what the sound of Whitehorse is,” says McClelland. “For us, it’s like having someone describe the way you look or having a lover describe what’s so great about you. You never really have an easy time understanding that. So having an outsider perspective saying ‘This is what’s great about you guys’ and having us focus on that was great.”

With Leave No Bridge Unburned in stores as of this week, Whitehorse is gearing up for an “eternity” of touring after a brief pause to mark the birth of Doucet and McClelland’s son, Jimmy, six months ago.

They are itching to go — “We played shows right up until I was basically giving birth,” notes McClelland — in no small part because there’s another hometown date at Massey Hall looming on May 8. The last Massey date was a pivotal moment for them.

“We weren’t shy about admitting that,” says McClelland. “We didn’t play it cool at all. We were so giddy the whole time. I mean, we’re from here. This is our home. To have all our fans there and play these songs that we’d toured so much we were totally confident about? Massey Hall means a lot. It’s such a special, magical place.”

“You know, artists want to be liked,” says Doucet. “We like to tell you that we don’t care, but that’s bullsh--. We make stuff for people and then we want them to like it and we want them to say nice things about us and come to our shows and buy our t-shirts or whatever. We’re like needy little puppies.”

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